Augustus

Teaching methods were painstaking, but hardly inspired, a matter of imitation and repetition. The school day opened with a breakfastless dawn and ran on into the afternoon. No attention was paid to games or gymnastics (fathers looked after boys’ physical exercise), but the long hours of instruction ended with a bath. Pupils had to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet before being shown what they looked like; they chanted the letters all in order forward and backward. They then graduated to groups of two or three letters, and finally to syllables and words.

In about 51 B.C., when Gaius was twelve, his grandmother Julia died. It must have been a sign of their closeness that the boy was given the signal honor of delivering a eulogy at her funeral. The invitation is also evidence that he was growing into a self-possessed and clever teenager, who was likely to acquit himself well. He addressed a large crowd and was warmly applauded.

Gaius at last moved into his stepfather’s household, where both Atia and Philippus took his secondary education into hand. He attended a school run by a grammaticus, a teacher of literature and language, the staples of the curriculum. Both Greek and Latin were taught, but literary studies centered on the Hellenic inheritance: the epic poems of Homer, the Athenian dramatists, and the great orators. (There was a Latin literature, but it was rough-hewn and heavily dependent on Greek paradigms.) As Cicero drily put it: “We must apply to our fellow-countrymen for virtue, but for our culture to the Greeks.”

The teacher specialized in textual analysis, examining syntax and the rules of poetic scansion and explaining obscure or idiomatic phrases. The student learned to read texts aloud with conviction and persuasiveness, to master the art of parsing (that is, breaking a sentence down into its constituent grammatical parts), and to scan verse. This form of schooling had a long life: it survived into the Dark Ages and was reinvigorated in the Renaissance. As one modern commentator has observed, “There was not a great difference in the teaching of Latin and Greek between early nineteenth-century Eton and the schools of imperial Rome.”

The grammaticus also introduced the student to rhetoric, the art of public speaking. Most upper-class Roman men were destined for a career in politics, so the ability to persuade people to adopt a course of action or entertain an opinion was an essential skill. But oratory was held to be more than a talent; it conduced to the leading of a good life. The statesman and moralist Cato the Censor defined an orator as “a good man skilled in speech.”

Apparently Gaius showed great promise: if this is not a later invention, boys ambitious for a political career used to go around with him when he went out riding or visited the houses of relatives and friends. Like the adult senators, who used to walk through the city accompanied by crowds of dependents, Gaius was attracting young adherents whose support would be returned, they hoped, by help whether now or in the future. This will have had less to do with his charm or intelligence than with the fact that he was related to Rome’s most powerful politician, Julius Caesar.

Gaius made two special school friends, very different from each other in personality. The first was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a year younger than Gaius. The origins of his family are unknown, but Suetonius says that he was of “humble origin”; the name “Vipsanius” is highly unusual and Agrippa himself preferred not to use it. He may have come from Venetia or Istria in northern Italy. Like the Octavii, the family was probably of affluent provincial stock.

According to Aulus Gellius, a collector of curious anecdotes and other unconsidered trifles, the word “Agrippa” denoted an infant “at whose birth the feet appeared first, instead of the head.” Breech births were difficult to manage and could endanger the mother’s life. It is said that Marcus was born in this perilous manner, and was so named in memory of the event.

Gaius’ second friend, Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, boasted a distinguished ancestry. He traced his lineage to the splendid, mysterious Etruscan civilization, based in today’s Tuscany, which dominated central Italy before the rise of Rome. The Etruscans were believed by some to be immigrants from Lydia in Asia Minor. Maecenas was of regal stock, descending on his mother’s side from the Cilnii, who many centuries before ruled the Etruscan town of Arretium (today’s Arezzo). By the first century B.C., though, the family had come down somewhat in the world: they were now equites.